Aviation Infrastructure Performance: A Study in Comparative Political Economy

2. Delayed! U.S. Aviation Infrastructure Policy at a Crossroads

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, travelers’fears of flying have given way to their anxieties about delays they may encounter when going through airport security, leaving the departure gate and taking off, flying to their destination,and landing and disembarking from the aircraft.In 2005 inflight delays and earlier airport arrivals for security screening were estimated to cost passengers and airlines in the United States $40 billion annually.1 Of course, delays are hardly a new concern with airline travel.As shown in figure 2-1, travel times have been increasing for the past three decades. Forecasts by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) call for more than 1 billion passenger enplanements by 2016, indicating that landside and airborne delays and their associated costs will become significantly worse unless the nation’s aviation infrastructure—airports and air traffic control—improves the efficiency with which it helps passengers get to their destinations.2 Currently responsibility for basic aeronautical services in the United States—including terminals, gates, taxiing areas, and runways—lies with local 2 Delayed! U.S. Aviation Infrastructure Policy at a Crossroads steven a. morrison and clifford winston 7 1. Total delay costs for 2005 are obtained as follows. The U.S. Department of Transportation (2006) estimated that aircraft delays cost passengers $9.4 billion. This figure is likely to be an underestimate because the delays to passengers are inferred from delays to aircraft. Passenger delays are likely to be greater than aircraft delays because delays to passengers may cause them to miss connections. Using Federal Aviation Administration delay data, the Air Transport Association in 2006 estimated that the additional operating costs to airlines from delays were $5.9 billion. Finally, a one-hour earlier arrival at an airport for security purposes valued at $50 an hour (obtained by applying Transportation Department guidelines to determine the value of time in 2005 for airline travelers) for roughly 500 million trips resulted in an additional cost of $25 billion. 2. FAA (2006). 02-9395-3 CH 02 2/29/08 2:06 PM Page 7 governments that operate airports either directly, as in the case of small airports , or through airport authorities, as in the case of medium and large airports . The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is responsible for airport security, and the FAA provides air traffic control. In 2004 the FAA’s air traffic control function was reorganized into the Air Traffic Organization (ATO), a“performance-based”organization. Nonetheless, the ATO remains an agency within a civil aviation administration that is funded by annual budget appropriations from Congress. Congress has repeatedly criticized the FAA for the excessive delays and cost overruns it has experienced in trying to develop a technologically up-to-date air traffic control system that would reduce U.S. airborne delays by expanding usable airspace capacity. Some members of Congress have characterized the TSA as a bloated bureaucracy whose screening tasks could be performed better and more efficiently by private screeners. Congress has not singled out airport authorities for criticism, but before September 11, Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, advocated privatization of the airports managed 8 Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston Figure 2-1. Changes in Components of Actual Flight Time since 1977 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Air time Ground time 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 Change in flight time (minutes) Source: Authors’ calculations from data in U.S. Department of Transportation, Service Segment Data and Schedule T-100, Data Bank 28DS, Domestic Segment Data. The data in the graph are based on a fixed set of flight segments (that is, all domestic segments in the Service Segment and 28DS databases for which data were available for all years 1977–2006). Changes in flight time at the segment level were aggregated using 1977 passenger weights. 02-9395-3 CH 02 2/29/08 2:06 PM Page 8 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Despite complaints by elected officials and an increasingly frustrated flying public, delays seem to be an inescapable part of air travel. Finally, in September 2007, President George W. Bush invited aviation officials and U.S. Department of Transportation secretary Mary Peters to the Oval Office to discuss solutions to air travel delays, proclaiming,“We’ve got a problem,we understand there’s a problem,and we’re...